


A Girl With Pink Hair

by glasssmoothie



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Fae & Fairies, Fantasy, Original Fiction, Subtext, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-12 11:40:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28759725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glasssmoothie/pseuds/glasssmoothie
Summary: An interaction taking place in a forest known for disappearances. Loosely based in fae lore, I think Celtic fae lore. Witchcraft loosely based on educational videos on TikTok (cringe, I know). Original piece written for a creative writing class.
Kudos: 4





	A Girl With Pink Hair

She's got to be the most colorful person I've ever seen. Her jeans are covered in patches, her tank top is a vivid forest green, and her hair is a neon pink color that I've only ever seen in the highlighter section of Office Max. She has earrings in the shape of pentagrams, a large amethyst crystal necklace, and a blue lace choker. A tattoo of a double-headed gold snake wraps around her arm, over which a black bag is slung. I catch her eye momentarily across the clearing, a deep oak brown. She smirks, winks, and turns away, down a dark, brushy forest path full of bramble. The path is unnaturally dark, as if the bright summer sun is incapable of shining on it. 

I've never gone down that trail; local lore claims the place at the end of it is overrun with dark spirits, ghosts, fae, or demons. Nobody's claims seem to match, exactly, but the overall consensus is that it's some bad juju. I don't exactly believe in the stuff, but I'm not fool enough to mess with it either. Besides, a lot of girls have disappeared from the area over the years, and I'm not about to be one of them. 

Except that this strange girl just walked right down there. She looked my age, but I've never seen her on campus. Could she not know? Or maybe she does, and is simply unafraid of the lore. Either way, I can't imagine it's a safe area for a young woman to go alone. Especially if the lore about the fae is real, which I doubt, but my grandmother used to tell me stories about them, before she died. How they liked to entice young women to join them, with promises of secrets and eternal youth. She told me never to accept food from the fae, for if one did that, the fae would be able to control them however they wished, forever. 

I stand, snap my sketchbook shut, and stow it in my backpack. Dead leaves rustle under my feet as I make my way down the allegedly haunted path. Thorny bushes snag on my leggings and scratch at my ankles. A branch snaps to my right, and I whirl around, looking for the source. I can't see anything through the brush and alder saplings. I can feel the hair on the back of my neck rising. Why am I doing this? I don't know this girl. 

Laughter bubbles through the air ahead of me, soft and mirthful. I forge ahead, cursing myself for getting myself involved in this mess. If I go missing, it will be entirely my fault.  
My foot catches on something, and I fall face-first to the ground. I curse, and push myself up onto my knees. I look around, and my jaw drops. If it's even possible, the sun is brighter here than it was on the other end of the trail, streaming through the trees like liquid gold. I've stumbled into a clearing, surrounded by birch trees with trunks so white, they're almost blinding. In the center of the clearing is an apple tree, no taller than a person, and covered in knots and gnarls. Each fruit is a bright ruby red, shining and flawless. The girl is sitting under the tree, slicing an apple with a small silver pocket knife. She's staring right at me, smirking again. 

"Hey there," she says, with a voice like silk. "Why'd you follow me?" 

"I…" I stand, staring at her. "I wanted to make sure you were safe." 

She giggles, and pops an apple slice in her mouth. "Come sit with me." I pause, then walk into the clearing and sink down onto the soft brown leaves beside her. She hands me an apple slice. I take a bite. It's sweet like honey, and crisp as an autumn day, unlike any other apple I've ever tasted. It warms my stomach like a shot of whiskey. 

"So why wouldn't I be safe, coming down here?" she asks. Her lips are as red as the apples hanging from the tree. 

"I mean, there have been disappearances before. Some people go down this trail, don't come back. Most of the locals avoid it. They say… I don't know, bunch of urban legends." 

"Tell me." Her smile is enchanting, her eyes shining like copper. 

"Well, they say there are inhuman things back in the woods here. Dark spirits, ghosts, demons, fae, nobody can agree on what exactly, but bad things." 

She giggles. "This place doesn't seem bad to me." 

I smile. "No, it doesn't, does it?" I take another bite of apple. I watch a monarch butterfly as it drifts down from the treetops and lands on the strange girl's pink hair. 

"I don't think anyone's going to be disappearing after today," the girl says. 

The confusion must be apparent on my face. She stands, and brushes dead leaves from the backs of her legs, and turns back to me. She holds out her hand. 

"Do you know something about this place?" I ask. She seems far too comfortable here, given what I just told her about disappearances. 

"Come with me, I want to show you something." Her hand is still outstretched toward me. 

"I don't even know you. I shouldn't have followed you, I'm sorry, I'll go." I stand and push past her, heading back toward the trail. 

"Wait!" she jogs after me, and puts her hand on my shoulder when I pause. "Please, I didn't mean to freak you out." I turn to look at her. How can I say no to that face? The sun shines in her eyes, revealing tiny streaks of green in the irises. 

"Okay." I don't know why I'm agreeing to this, but I think I can trust her. She takes my hand, and leads me to the opposite side of the clearing, down another trail, this one thinner but brighter. It twists and turns, but the girl keeps a firm grip on my hand. A large spruce tree looms ahead of us, its trunk so thick I could carve a tunnel and drive a car through it. As we get closer, I see that there is, in fact, a tunnel in the bottom of the tree, nowhere near big enough for a car, just large enough to crawl through. She lets go of my hand, and crawls into the tunnel. I pause for a moment, then follow suit. 

The tunnel leads into a chamber, large enough for two or three people to sit around the bowl in the center. It's made of brass, with animal faces and runes of some sort sculpted into the sides. It's full of ash and scorched bones. The walls are painted with runes similar to the ones on the bowl, and various dried herbs and dusty glass bottles hang from the ceiling, which is painted with a large symbol, like an eight-pointed star with a scorpion in the center. There's a hole off to the side of the symbol, I think as a makeshift chimney. The place smells strongly of incense and earth. I don't know how this place is lit; it's dim, but nowhere near as dark as it should be. The girl smiles at me, and starts to pull a variety of strange items from her bag. A rodent skull, a small bundle of blue jay feathers, sticks of incense, candles of every color, and a box of matches. 

"What is all this?" I ask. Some sort of witchcraft, I assume. 

"A spell." Her brow is furrowed with concentration as she carves various runes into a white candle. 

"What kind of spell?" 

"A protection spell." 

"Protection from what?" 

She smirks, glances at me, then continues her work. "How did you put it? Dark spirits, ghosts, demons, fae, nobody knows." 

"Except you do." 

She hums to herself, and doesn't answer. She finishes carving, blows away the scraps of wax, and sets it in a candelabra that I hadn't noticed sitting behind the bowl. She mutters something in some foreign language, then lights the candle with a smooth flick of her match. She continues to mutter as she plucks various different herbs from the ceiling, setting them in the bowl alongside the rodent skull and a single blue feather. From her bag she pulls a silver flask, with Seattle, Washington and the space needle engraved on the side, and pours a golden liquid over the contents of the bowl. Whiskey, I assume. She puts the flask down and takes the candle from its holder, lighting the contents of the bowl. The smell is unlike anything I've ever experienced before; sweet and bitter and spicy and earthy and smokey all at once. She mutters the strange phrase a few more times, then stops. She blows out the flame, leaving a smoking pile of junk, then looks up at me. 

"What was all that?" I ask. 

"As I said. Protection spell." 

"From wha-" A scream from outside the tree cuts me off. I scramble through the tunnel, into the bright sun outside the tree. Looking every which way, I run away from the tree, searching for the source of the scream. In the bushes there is a man, lying on the ground, his hands clutched over his chest. His eyes are wide and glassy, staring up at the sky. His chest is not moving. The strange girl walks up to us, and stands beside me. 

"I'll bet you won't be hearing about disappearances around here anymore," she says, no remorse in her voice. I look over at her. Her face is indifferent. 

"It was just… a man?" 

"Yes. The fae typically don't care to bother humanity, and there's no spirits or demons around here. Most of the mystical problems that humanity faces are just really screwed-up humans." 

"So none of it was real." 

"Oh, it's real all right. You saw my spell. It just wasn't the cause of this specific problem." She hoists her bag more securely onto her shoulder, and hands me my bag, which I must have left in the tree. "Wait a few hours before alerting the police. I need to clean up my workshop." I stare at her, then at the body, then back at her. 

"You… you killed him." 

"And he killed how many people before?" She sighs. "Go home. Leave an anonymous tip to the police at sundown. I hope that I'll see you again, but I hope I never have to." She nudges my shoulder, and I take a few steps down the trail, back toward the apple tree. I stop again, and turn. She has a book open, and is muttering something over the man's corpse. I watch her until she closes the book. She looks up and sees me there. 

"I never got your name," I say. 

She smiles, and there's something off about it this time, as if all of our previous interactions she had been acting and was just now dropping the character. There's something wrong with the way her mouth stretches, the way her teeth are straighter and whiter than any teeth I've ever seen, how her eyes don't wrinkle in mirth. 

"I never gave it," she whispers. "Now go home, and hurry." 

She turns away and disappears into the tree trunk. I run, back down the trail, into the clearing with the apple tree. It is no longer magically bright, and the fruit on the tree does not glimmer as it did earlier. I keep running. The trail here is no longer mystically dark, it is simply another stretch of ordinary woods. I don't stop running until I've left the woods, run down the dead end street and down the two blocks to the house I share with three other girls, all of them out shopping or running other various errands. I close the door, and immediately collapse in the entryway, trying to catch my breath. I want to go back to the woods, back to that girl, but something is telling me I can't. I have to wait for sunset, to call the police about that dead man. There is nothing else I can possibly do. I stand, and climb upstairs to my room and sit on my bed, my phone in my hand, watching the sky, waiting for the slightest tinge of yellow. I think about what happened today. I recall the strange features of her face, how lovely it was to sit with her, eating that apple. 

And then it hits me. 

I accepted food from a fae.


End file.
